John C. Darrin

Author – Consultant

Joshua Keating is a staff writer for Slate Magazine and a former editor at Foreign Policy magazine. One of his recent articles led with the headline, “Malls make tempting targets for terrorists.”

Duh. (No offense, Joshua. I understand that many people don’t realize this. The “duh” was intended for them, not you.)

From a Rand study on shopping malls as potential terrorist targets from 2006:

“In terms of their potential role as terrorist targets, shopping centers present numerous challenges for security.”

“Shopping centers are distributed throughout the United States … in areas that are considered high risk for terrorist attack …”

“Shopping centers also allow unimpeded access to the public and attract a wide cross-section of the nation’s population.”

“… shopping center customers and tenants may not tolerate the expense and inconvenience of increased security.”

“… shopping centers may have a difficult time justifying investment in reducing the seemingly remote risk of terrorism.”

The absolutely true platitude is, “the goal of terrorism is to terrorize.” Any place with easy access and little security that attracts large crowds and is fundamental to our way of life is an ideal target, and shopping centers fill this role perfectly.

From our book, The Rockets’ Red Glare:

At the moment dirty bombs were going off in Washington and Orlando, and two terrorists were dying in Chicago, thwarted in their mission, there were 36,482 people in the mall. About a quarter of them were within the intended blast radius of the bomb vest.

At that moment in The Mall of America, all those people were going about their lives, oblivious to the events, to their danger, shopping or working or just having fun.

And at that moment in The Mall of America, nothing happened.

Their bomb was in the FBI radiation forensics lab instead of on Mervat Saad, standing with the crowds in front of Macy’s, waiting to martyr himself.

Their cesium was safely in a storage container instead of contaminating a million square feet of some of the most densely populated floor space in America.

Nothing happened at The Mall of America, and no one realized it.

This is why we called our genre Forecast Fiction. It could happen before your next birthday, exactly as we described it, and you wouldn’t be surprised. Shocked, horrified, aghast, etc. But not surprised. All of the pieces are there, right now.

The Rand study is an excellent example of a well-thought out identification of a threat, recommendations for neutralizing, or at least diminishing, it, and reasons why it won’t be done until after the fact. Even the attack in Kenya is unlikely to motivate mall owners to make the investment in the appropriate security measures. And American shoppers, halfway around the globe from Kenya, are unlikely to put up with the inconvenience of these measures when they have so many shopping options.

Again, from the Rand study:

“… disaster preparedness plans and exercises that focus primarily on emergency response do little to reduce terrorism risk. The vast majority of terrorism risk derives from attacks using explosives, for which the effects are immediate and the hazard abates very quickly. As a result, little can be done to reduce consequences (casualties or property damage) of a terrorist attack once it has occurred.”

Explosives plus radioactive materials changes the scenario dramatically. All of a sudden, the consequences to people and property damage do not abate quickly. And, as I noted in a previous post, Syrian Dirty Bomb, adding those radioactive materials does not require much effort, expense, or expertise. Just the motivation and will.

One of the major themes in our book, The Rockets’ Red Glare, is the alliance between two very disparate and even hostile terror groups – al Qaeda and the domestic hate group WAR (White Aryan Resistance). A lot of people find this possibility unbelievable, an obvious contradiction to our dedication to “Forecast Fiction.” How could two groups whose long-term goal is the eradication of the other come together and plan and execute a joint attack?

The phrase “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” is generally thought to be an ancient Arabic proverb. According to the Yale Book of Quotations, it actually came from Kautilya, the “Indian Machiavelli,” in the Arthashastra, a foundational text of military strategy written in Sanskrit around the 4th century B.C.

Throughout history we have seen sworn enemies come together in the face of a common threat. The United States allied with Joseph Stalin to defeat Hitler’s Nazis. You cannot get two societies more at odds than those. After the war, the US supported murderous dictators such as Pinochet in Chile and Seko in Zaire in the Cold War with the USSR. And they in turn allied with their traditional enemy China and with anti-Communist Nasser in Egypt. In China, the arch-enemies Mao and Chiang Kai-shek allied to fight the Japanese before renewing their civil war.

And all of these unlikely alliances have taken place in the last 80 years. We have all of human history before that, full of the same phenomenon. Imagine the others that have taken place since Kautilya first codified the concept.

In 2006, Prof. George Michael of the University of Virginia’s College at Wise, published his study called The Enemy of My Enemy in which he explored the possibilities of cooperation between militant foreign Islamic groups and domestic right-wing hate groups. He noted that they share “fervent anti-Semitism, accompanied by strong pro-Palestinian views, anger over Israel’s influence on American policymakers, and opposition to the Iraq War and the U.S. presence in the Middle East.”

So here’s today’s kicker. The BBC’s in-depth research into the Boston Marathon bomber, radical Muslim terrorist Tamerlan Tsarnaev, uncovered that he “subscribed to publications espousing white supremacy and government conspiracy theories.” It is simply naïve to believe that these two groups, or others of similar beliefs, would not cooperate to attack America. These groups, despite their antipathy towards one another, are both so certain of their righteousness and ultimate predominance that expediency is seen as simply the end justifying the means.

And this presents a whole new challenge to law enforcement and homeland security. How many more Timothy McVeigh’s do you suppose are out there? And how many foreign terrorists eager to make their acquaintance?

A spokesperson for Tsarnaev’s Mosque in Cambridge, Nicole Mossalam, said he was an angry young man. “I would say he was just a Muslim of convenience.”

Isn’t that what this is all about? What is convenient today to accomplish my goals right now, working with whoever can help me? Tomorrow will take care of itself.

A recent headline: “Syrian Radioactive Materials Out of Regulatory Control: Is Al Qaeda Looking for Dirty Bomb Materials Within Damascus?”

The news reports this past week have been consumed with the UN investigation of the Syrian government’s use of chemical weapons, the report by the UN inspection team, and the threat of military retaliation by Western powers. Lost is all of this was this item, buried at the end of a Reuters report talking about Syria’s nuclear research reactor and the possibility of damage to it from any military action:

“Olli Heinonen, a former chief IAEA inspector, said other radioactive materials may be a bigger reason to worry.

‘Syria should have substantial amounts of radiation sources such as Co-60 or Cs-137, which in my view are of a greater concern, if they end up in wrong hands. Normally they are stored in protected vaults.’ “

The paragraphs before and after this rather shocking statement (to me, anyway) ignored the serious issue of old radioactive sources that may or not be protected.

Then just recently we get this:

“Jordan says the United States has helped it boost its nuclear security by improving detection of radioactive materials at its borders as concern grows over instability in neighboring Syria. Jordanian officials have expressed worries that radioactive materials from Syria and its ally Iran could be moved across Jordan’s border to Saudi Arabia and other Gulf Arab countries in case of an all-out war in Syria. Analysts say that Syria could host ongoing, illicit nuclear weapons activity by Iran and North Korea.”

“The US donated to Jordan 35 personal radiation detectors valued altogether at nearly $106,000 on Sunday. An embassy statement said it will curb nuclear proliferation and illicit trafficking of nuclear and radioactive materials.”

The story immediately segues into chemical weapons and ignores the topic any further.

WMD’s of all types are attracting a lot of attention, but the fact remains that radiological dispersion devices, RDD’s or dirty bombs, present arguably the biggest WMD threat from terrorists. In his study, Homeland Security expert Randall Larson assesses the capability of terrorist groups to commit a WMD attack using various weapons. On a 1 to 10 scale, with 10 being the highest capability to commit such an attack, he says conventional explosives are a 10 while chemical weapons are a 3 for military grade weapons and 6 for simple industrial chemicals. Biological weapons get a 7 while nuclear bombs get a 5. So, where does a dirty bomb fall on his scale?

It’s a 10, right up there with a bag of fertilizer and some kerosene.

And that is the basis for our book, The Rockets’ Red Glare. Our primary goal was to entertain, but we wanted to do it in a realistic way, in a Forecast Fiction way. So we chose dirty bombs, and we showed how they could be acquired with not much more effort than it takes to get conventional explosives.

The delivery mechanism, fireworks on the 4th of July, was designed to scare you, period. An airburst happens to be one of the most effective delivery systems for a dirty bomb. Exploded at ground level within an urban environment limits the dispersion, so a small area gets hit very hard, as accurately described in one scene in the book. A high airburst maximizes the dispersion, so a large area gets relatively small amounts of contamination, resulting in a relatively small risk to those exposed to the point where only localized hot spots would require restoration. A low airburst, like we hypothesized, maximizes the dispersion within an area that will need to be isolated and cleaned up at a very high cost.

It appears there is concern that the turmoil and motivations of the combatants might result in terrorist groups gaining access to these materials and using them within Syria, or even more significantly, smuggling them out for use anywhere their fanaticism dictates – Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Israel, the U.S. It is another problem amongst the many resulting from the civil war there, and it is a very significant one.